The Great Glass Sea (63 page)

That night, the Shopsins either weren’t home or wouldn’t come to their door. He went out to the sidewalk, pleaded, tugged on sleeves, finally found someone who let him use their mobile phone. Standing in the cold, beneath their impatient stare, he waited for someone to pick up. When his brother’s voice answered, he spoke right over the hello: “I know it’s you, Yarik!” But his brother only carried on. For a moment, Dima stared, perplexed, into the face of the phone’s owner staring back, and then the answering message was done and Dima said his brother’s name to the machine, asked it, “Why are you throwing rocks at my window? Why?”

“That’s enough,” the phone’s owner told him.

But Dima only raised his voice. “Come up,” he said over the other man. “Come up.”

It was into the second half of winter, more than a month since the last time he had seen the car, and there was a meter of new snow on the ground, his underclothes damp with sweat from pushing through it, his pants dark with slush, his jacket wet, and all of him cold, the day Dima came home to the apartment and found the heat turned off. He didn’t even realize how cold it was inside until he hung his jacket above the heater, stripped off his pants and shirt and lay them over it, and the back of his hand touched the metal and wasn’t burned. Then, standing in the hallway in his underwear and bare feet, it hit him. His jaw started shaking, as if the bone had realized it, too.

“Mama?” he said through shivering lips.

She wasn’t on her mattress where he’d left her that morning. It had become hard for her to move around—she needed a doorknob or chair arm to cling to—and he had moved her bed to the living room, set it near the bathroom door, brought her a piece of plastic piping for a cane. It was missing, too. He called louder.

“Good evening, lyubimy!” she called back.

Her voice came from inside her bedroom, and grabbing his bathrobe and socks off the floor, he crossed the living room and went in.

She was sitting on the dark patch of old carpeting where her bed frame had been. Her back was to him, and, standing on one foot, putting on a sock, he said, “Good evening, Mama.” Her head swiveled. “Aren’t you going to ask me how work was?”

“You don’t work,” she said.

His fingers froze. And, before she turned back to whatever was in her hands, he saw it: the lucidity in her eyes, the sudden presence of the mother he remembered.

All around her was mounded everything he hadn’t sold: her meager jewelry, the dresses and shoes and hats she’d never wear again, the boxes that stored the artifacts of her life, all left untouched by him, now strewn across the floor. She had separated it into piles, islands of clothes, trinkets, toiletries, each item tagged with a torn piece of paper. Her sewing box lay on its side, drawers spilling a hundred colors of thread, a cloud of pinheads shimmering above their cushion set beside her.

“Are you OK?” he said to her back. She was wearing what he’d dressed her in that morning—her threadbare nightgown, wool socks and slippers, the kosinka that always bound her hair—nothing more. “Mama, aren’t you cold?”

She stayed bent over whatever was in her lap. Going to her, he crouched before a pile, picked up a low-heeled shoe. A pin had been pushed through the black leather where the bridge of the foot would be. The scrap of paper it held in place proclaimed, in her unsteady letters,
ZINAIDA
. He set it down, picked up a knit hat.
YARIK,
the pinned tag said. There was a half-used jar of face cream.
SELL,
she’d written on it. He picked through half the things in the pile—
TIMYA
on a Young Pioneer scarf;
POLYA
on a tangle of hair ties;
DIMA
on a leather wallet, the pin bent as she had shoved it through—and, in another pile, he sifted among old reading glasses; a chewed tobacco pipe; the first tiny pair of ice skates that he and Yarik had shared. He crouched behind his mother, put his chin on her shoulder, looked down at what she was holding. A sheaf of papers, holes punched along one edge, bound together by a brittle strip of leather. The ink had browned, but the drawing was exactly as Dima remembered: the rowboat with its prow leaping over a curl of wave, the oar a tiny stick floating away, almost into the stars that his own fingers had scattered across the top of the page. Below them, two boys huddled in the boat, wrapped in each other’s arms. A child’s unsteady script:
Now that they had stopped rowing they were starting to get very cold
. He could not remember whether he or Yarik had written the words, but he remembered the two of them reading it aloud together to their mother that long-ago day in the sanitarium.

Now, he asked her, quietly, which pile the book belonged in. Her eyes stayed on the page. He tried to ease it from her fingers, but they gripped tighter.

“Is there a pile for each of us?” he asked.

She held on, her hands shaking.

“Is there one for me?”

She nodded.

“Does this go there?”

“No,” she said.

“I’d like it,” he told her.

“No,” she said again. And when she turned her eyes on him, he could see the clarity was still there. He could see her trying to fight whatever was trying to take it from her, the way she had in the week after his father, her husband, had died, and he sat with his chest pressed to her shoulder, a nine-year-old boy looking at his mother with her gone-white hair, her determined eyes, her lips trembling when she spoke: “It’s for Yarik.”

“Why?”

“For Yarik.”

He nodded. “OK,” he said. “Do you want me to put it in his pile?”

It was one of the worst things that he had seen: his mother, so there just a second ago, beginning to leave. He almost put his hand over her eyes to keep from having to watch the confusion come back in.

“What pile?” she said.

Just as, all those years ago, in that week before the men from the sanitarium had come to take her from her sons, she had lost the battle, too.

The children were running around the old grade school, past the dun brick, the slatey window glass, circling the building in single file, tramping a ring in the snow. The path they beat was dark and gray as the sky above, and watching them from behind the wrought iron fence, the old pair of ice skates hung around his neck, Dima felt again the burning freeze: six years old, and he and Yarik doing the same—the screwed-down stare at the back of the boy in front, the mittened hands rubbing at ears turned to icicles, the shouts of the
gymnastics coach,
Take those hands down!
—though thirty years ago the song had been a different one.

“Russia, our beloved country!” the children sang now.

“United and mighty, our Soviet land!” they had sung then.

And, too, they had run it—his and Yarik’s entire class—in their bare feet.

That first winter at school, each time the gymnastics coach made his whistle shriek, they had dropped to the ground, lain rocking on their backs, feet clamped in their hands, howls mixing with the white-breathed agony of all the other kids.

Look,
Yarik had later showed their father,
they’re bleeding.

What if our toes fall off?
Dima had said.

And their father, knocking that past night’s tobacco from his pipe, had bent to peer at their feet, the flame from his match so close to their soles they could feel its heat.

Your toes won’t fall off,
he told them.

How do you know?
Dima said.

Because
—he shook out the match—
I’m going to teach you how to keep them on.

He told them to lie down on their backs, and, grunting exaggerated puffs, laughing through the smoke in his mouth, he hauled them by their arms and legs into the position he wanted. They lay there feet to feet.
This is how your dyadya and I would do it,
he said,
every time the gym coach blew for the break
and they had let him arrange them the rest of the way, his calloused fingers on Dima’s ankles as he dragged him into his brother, his big hands lifting Yarik’s small ones as he made room for the one’s feet to wedge into the other’s underarms. When he was done, they lay with their toes in each other’s pits, their arms pressed tight to the sides of each other’s legs.

The armpits
, their father said, crouched at the middle of their single tangled shape,
are the warmest part of the body
.
Except—
he grinned—
for the crotch.
And with the bowl of his pipe he rapped each one a quick knock there. Over them, he stood, his face scrimmed by pipe smoke, watching them squirm with laughter and pain.

All that winter, every time the gymnastics coach blew his whistle, they would drop to the snow and scoot into the shape their father showed them, lying still, squeezing, amid the wild writhing of the other kids. And all that summer they worked at Dyadya Avya’s barefoot, building a layer of calluses opaque and hard as the trimmings carved off the milk cows’ hooves, so that by winter they could run all ten circles around the grade school without ever having to stop.

Until the winter they turned nine, when the boys from the grade below came running, shouting from too far away to be understood, their billows of breath like some signal the brothers couldn’t read. Dima and Yarik were halfway through their laps when the boys burst into them, blood in their cheeks, their eyes alight with news.

They ran barefoot all the way to the lake, their feet crunching snow, slapping the ice alongside trolley tracks, the frozen surface of Otseva. Out there: a huddle of men. Dark shapes against the brightness, more hurrying from the shore. The ever-gusting wind had blown the glassy surface clear and on it stood a hundred oystercatchers, red-beaked and black, and they rose in waves around the running boys. Wingbeats, caws. The men seemed to part as easily, the first not knowing who was pushing through, the next gone still at the sight of them, a last few hands grasping for their arms, their jacket collars, anything to grab them by and hold. They fought the grips, silent, struggling, until they saw him. So close they could almost have touched his face with their outstretched fingers, if it hadn’t been under so much ice. His black hair a floating blur beneath the surface, the black strip of his mustache—it had always smelled of pipe smoke, been warm with breath, tickled their cheeks—shifting with the current down there like something alive.

Coming through the crowd: a man in a hard hat, gloves gripping a long black pole, its iron tip wedge-shaped as a serpent’s head. Behind him: the open ice of the lake, and three more men crossing it at a strange and shuffling run. Between two a ladder rattled. The third carried a heavy maul.

By the time they dragged the body out, Dima could feel the ice like spikes through the soles of his feet. They stabbed up through his ankles and split his shins and pierced his knees. Still he stood, barefoot, watching his brother tear free of his jacket, run to their father, grab a frozen hand, shove the stiff fingers beneath his armpit, call for Dima to take the other. And fighting their father’s cold wet coat, pushing his own fingers into the crevice between arm and chest, he’d felt the hardness of the skin in that hollow where his father’s limb joined his father’s body, the utter absence of heat.

Plenty of room for dreams and for life

The coming years promise to us.

Allegiance to our Motherland gives us strength.

So it was, so it is, and so it will always be.

The last words submerged beneath gasping breath, the slowing shrush of boots in snow, and then the children stopped, and there was Timofei standing bent over his knees, coughing. A few kids around him collapsed into the drifts. The
gymnastics coach kicked snow onto their faces, started to herd them all inside.

Dima looked for something to throw at the child. He was standing behind a wrought iron fence, far enough away he would have to shout to be heard. Between the fence and the street, around his boots, food wrappers were strewn among cups and straws. A single red glove, wet to the color of old blood, spread like a hand emerging from the sooty bank. Around it: brown glass bottles barely visible beneath the snow. Around them a bright scattering of metal caps. Quickly, he pried four out.